ABOUT LEGACY ARTISTS

Legacy Artists are painters and sculptors whose estates have been accepted by ALF's board of directors and entrusted by the artist or artist's heirs to the Artists' Legacy Foundation in perpetuity. These artists' legacies include artwork, archives, ephemera, property and reputations. Viola Freybecame ALF's first Legacy Artist after her death in 2004. She bequeathed her artwork, her archives, and her estate to the Foundation, enabling ALF to hire an executive director in 2005 and launch its Artist Award program in 2007.

Squeak Carnwath has planned on becoming a Legacy Artist since founding ALF in 2000, when she and her husband, Gary Knecht revised their wills leaving her artwork and their estates in ALF's care.

If you are a painter or sculptor who may be interested in becoming a Legacy Artist, you are invited to contact the executive director to discuss options and opportunities.

Since receiving Viola Frey's bequest, the Artists' Legacy Foundation has enhanced her legacy by supporting and promoting the exhibition Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey, which was organized by the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin and the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, and also traveled to the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City and the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock. ALF loaned work to the exhibition and helped the curators produce a high-quality catalogue by opening the Frey archives for research, assisting with that research, and providing introductions to significant people in Frey's life and career.

ALF worked closely with the Nancy Hoffman Gallery, Frey's gallery in New York, to plan its 2007 exhibition, Viola Frey: Relationships/Interrelationships and its 2010 exhibition Every Man, Every Woman: The Figures of Viola Frey. Similarly, ALF worked with the Sylvia White Gallery in Ventura, California, for its 2010 show Legacy in Paint and Clay. Additional gallery exhibitions are planned, and ALF has initiated discussions with museum curators for an exhibition of Frey's works on paper as well as other exhibitions in the future.

Beyond facilitating museum and gallery exhibitions, the Foundation organizes, stores, conserves, and insures all of Frey's artwork and is creating a working database to make information about her artwork readily accessible; ALF has commenced a long-term project to produce the Frey catalogue raisonné and is organizing the artist's papers and other archival materials to make them available and accessible to researchers, scholars, and students
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BIGGER, BETTER, MORE: THE ART OF VIOLA FREY

The Artists' Legacy Foundation is proud to offer the catalogue, "Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey" for purchase. The catalogue was published in April 2009 in conjunction with the exhibition organized by the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin and the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Ontario. It includes essays by Davira S. Taragin, curator of the exhibition, and Patterson Sims, former director of the Montclair Museum of Art. Both essays offer never-before-published facts and fresh interpretations of both Frey's life and her art. The book contextualizes her work within the San Francisco Bay Area art scene and within twentieth-century art and ceramics generally. A comprehensive chronology provides an overview of Frey's exhibition history, and a list of selected collections illustrates the breadth of interest in her work. The catalogue is available in both hard cover and soft cover, payable via PayPal.